PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SOUL

UNDERSTANDING ONESELF AND OTHERS

Religions die wlicn one points out their truth. Science is the history of dead religions.

Oscar Wilde

Although it is customary to say that scientific psychology originated with Aristotle who first interpreted dreams psychologically, a thorough history of psychology should cover all aspect^ ^of man's mental life from its beginning. Prescientific and nonscientific psychology has always been the true psychological discipline and the source of all psychologies, including those that study the soul scientifically. Scientific psychology which seems to know very little about the soul claims to seek the truth about it, but rejects the contributions of ancient beliefs, religion, and myths to its interpretation. It performs experiments which seem always to prove that the soul does not exist, and it lets the more tolerant science of ethnology perform what constructive research it can. Psychoanalysis claims this neglected area of psychology as its own, but it brings in its materialistic psychology to "explain" the soul, instead of first trying to relate its mental concepts to the spiritual sources which generated them/ Our present task, therefore, is not to apply psychoanalysis or any other modern psychology to this problem, but to investigate the principles which govern the soul concept as the source and object of psychological study. Our approach necessarily will be genetic and not historical. This orientation brings us to the fundamental question of all psychology as science,vyhich asks whether mental discipline is a proper concern for natural science or for philosophy, whether it is physics or metaphysics in the Aristotelian sense, and whether it is objective or subjective as natural science uses these terms. All psychological controversies, from Aristotle's scientific psychology to the conflicts between the various psychoanalytic schools, reduce to this question of a point of view. But in order to understand the controversies we must try to clarify the basic problem. Various stages of psychological knowledge disclose that the question of objective or subjective attitude and interpretation involves much more than two different kinds of observation. It concerns a dualism inherent in psychology itself, which I recognized when I once called psychology a relational science. This dualism involves the difference between psychology as selfknowledge and as a way of knowing others, or between psychology as a doctrine of self-awareness and as a "technique" for understanding and controlling others, whether the latter comprises a general science of character, reformative education, or therapy. The essential distinction is one between purely subjective psychology and applied objective psychology. ,'We shall see later how adequate such labels really are.

One might assert that psychology's orientation is objective even though its original methods and values may possibly have been subjective. But I prefer to call it applied because it is used to influence others, and I shall liken it to primitive magic because it was founded on just as definite spiritual premises.

Although Aristotle's first attempt to release psychology from its spiritual bonds with the ego and to make a natural science out of it actually came quite late in man's development, his was an isolated effort, for psychology did not become an independent science until the nineteenth century. Then, logically enough, it began as a purely psychological science of consciousness in the Cartesian sense, and as a sensory psychology, psychophysics, or "psychology without a soul." As before, it left the soul to the philosophers, so that material for a history of modern mental discipline can be found only in psychological developments from the time of Descartes. Such material would also show that the soul gradually underwent transformation into the unconscious, while the doctrine of conscious phenomena remained a purely psychological discipline.

As a synthesis of the conscious and unconscious, Freud's psychoanalysis has both its r strong and weak points. Freud wanted to carry a realistic psychology of self-awareness beyond consciousness, and to transform the mystical unconscious into an object of self-observation and objective investigation. He did succeed in expanding both psychology and the domain of consciousness, but since he explained the unconscious as realistically as sensory psychology had explained conscious phenomena, he excluded all its purely spiritual content. To be sure, he recognized spiritual content when he recognized the unconscious, but in explaining the unconscious materialistically he rejected the soul, because consciousness obviously involves something more than data about the outer world. He tried to explain the added elements by referring to the unconscious, while conceiving of the unconscious itself as a sediment of reality.

Yet the unconscious contains more than past reality, since part of itis as unreal or supernatural as the soul has always been. Originally, the soul was a purely inner, spiritual, and supernatural entity which became a matter of externals only at the hands of scientific psychology.

Although psychology may be a natural science, its spiritual basis defies explanation in terms of natural science or of psychology, because the psyche is neither a mere function of the brain nor a sublimation of instinct. Scientific psychology has tried to explain both impulse-man and brain-man on a common psychological basis, but as Bleuler frankly confesses, this attempt has left "a large hiatus." 1 The brain is just an instrument on which mental processes are played, and sexual impulse only one of their many expressions. Even if it were possible to comprehend all mental phenomena scientifically, the most important part of psychology, which concerns self-awareness, would remain unexplained because it is utterly subjective./

Although the value of this self-awareness lies in its subjectivity, the psychology concerned with it actually fails to disclose one's own mental life to oneself in the way that introspection is supposed to do. Introspection seems to be one of man's more recent and unnatural acquisitions, unsuited to the attainment of subjective self-awareness. It is more natural for man to project his own mental life on others than to learn about it directly through introspection. Projection has never been explained, probably because it is man's most characteristic and pervasive mental act.

We shall come to understand it better; for the moment I should like to suggest how it operates in scientific psychology.

Bleuler, Natural History of the Soul and of Its Conscious Interpretation [Naturgeschichte der Seele und ihres Bewusstwerdens] (Berlin: 1921), p. 54 ff.

As is well known, scientific psychology soon began to study thought processes. But the "method of association" which the young science had at its disposal had to characterize the thought of a person other than the experimenter. Although the results yielded by this method were said to have general significance, the experimenter himself was implicitly excluded from them as far as the experimental setting and outcome were concerned. Even psychoanalysis, which had laid aside the "objective" associative method for that of "free" association, betrays this same unpsychological character. For if an analyst's real aim is to discover general laws of the mental life of his patient, he at least should be included in the method no matter what the theoretical consequences. In practice, the analyst actually feels excluded from his method the more he tries to urge his psychology on the other person; so that for the same reason I called psychology relational in my Genetic Psychology ( Genetische Psychologic, Vol. II, p. 13), one may characterize the practical psychology of understanding man scientifically as a protective discipline. Just as we are apt to speak about other persons when questions of morality or education arise, what we really want at all times is to practice psychology of others as well as on them. And while it is understandable that we may require or possibly allow others to alter their own behavior, psychology still claims to be a discipline primarily concerned with knowledge of self, and tries paradoxically to win such knowledge from others and to test it out on them. In trying to defend its objective method, scientific psychology asserts that the object of its observation and research cannot also be its subject. But this logical difficulty is not as important as the emotional resistance that underlies it, for everyday experience proves that one's own ego can be even a fairly constant object of self-observation, and that the same errors inherent in such observation appear in studies of one's own projected psychology in others, be they students, patients, friends, or loved ones. Although natural science ideology easily inclines one to neglect differences which perhaps are more important in psychology than elsewhere, one does not need to get involved with the individual personality factors which are so difficult to establish, in order to sense the difference between the thought processes of a skilled experimenter and those of the average person upon whom he experiments. Nor does one need such involvement in order to. recognize that inferences from one person to another are not automatic, or that the psychologist who is really excluded from his findings on others has some right to assume one psychology about psychologists and another about those whom they psychologize. It seems to me that the psychologist may be really involved in his findings only to the degree that he succeeds in projecting his psychology on others. To be sure, he is usually unaware of this projection because he believes that he infers from the psychology of the person he studies to others and, therefore, to himself. Although one could well say that the results should be almost the same under these two conditions, it is the psychological attitude behind them which is important. For it seems to me that what we are really dealing with is an emotional basis for not wanting to use one's own ego as an object of psychological study. None of us really want to observe or know ourselves. Such observation is not natural to us, and it hurts and hinders far more than it helps us. Why else should we claim so often that we need to know ourselves better in order to make our selfconsciousness more bearable?

The objective psychology which began as magic became the pedagogue's, the social worker's, and the therapist's means of understanding, influencing, and controlling other persons. The subjective side of psychology is actually not a practical source of self-knowledge, because it tends to disturb our spontaneous action which is projective. The original naive tendency to project is anti-introspective, and objective scientific psychology is always projective and therefore subjective even when it looks like a psychology of the other person. Psychology's adjustment to this inevitable fact has been so rational that it actually postulates knowledge of self as a prerequisite to knowing others. But knowledge of self is not necessary to the understanding of others, because this understanding can be achieved intuitively or even objectively the less the knower tries to understand himself through his observation of others. I do not believe that psychology began as self-observation or introspection with self-knowledge as its goal. Of course, it has always been a subjective discipline, but its particular brand of subjectivity has exhausted itself in a form of self-portrayal which is as different from self-awareness as it can possibly be. Scientific psychology certainly must have arisen objectively as a discipline for influencing and controlling others. Self-knowledge was only its by-product which it first tolerated and then welcomed. It seems to me that this self-knowledge is responsible for the modern type of psychologist who in turn seeks it for himself and others. Expressed somewhat ironically, it is as though man had to find some use for his apparently worthless self-awareness, and so created out of it a science oriented not to the practical understanding of others but to a "scientific" justification of his pedagogical and therapeutic techniques. It turns out, then, that objective psychology owesits exalted value just to its subjective relation to our personal ego, and that the objective portion of our observation of others is unscientific because it is practical. The impracticality of a psychology restricted to self-observation is shown by our inability to imagine how such a scientist could qualify as a pedagogue, psychiatrist, or applied psychologist. Unless one can use his introspective skill he can only meditate upon his own thoughts and feelings, and can only become what the practical psychologist often calls a "compulsive neurotic" or, at best, a philosophical thinker. Most of us feel that selfknowledge is worth the effort only when we can use it to understand, control, or "help" others as we so often rationalize our intent to control.

Psychoanalysis itself is a lively subject for psychological research, for it combines the objective and the subjective, the technical and the purely theoretical, the natural scientific and the social scientific aspects of psychology in a way never before achieved. However, this seems to make psychoanalysis the final chapter and not just a new trend in the history of psychology. For in psychoanalysis, as in the violent controversies over its significance and province, we encounter the old fundamental problem of whether it is physics or metaphysics, medical or philosophical, or psychological or spiritual. Now it is obviously all of these, as every real psychology always was, is, and presumably will be. Just the peculiar combination of such contradictory elements composes this doctrine of psychoanalysis which began as a technique for influencing others and ended as a new metaphysics of the soul, and embodied in its own unsolved problems those of all psychology. The affective power of psychoanalysis lies just in its scientific weakness of being both psychology and spiritualdoctrine, and of failing to differentiate at all between these two aspects. Were psychoanalysis more definitely the one or the other, it could not be the unique fusion that it is. In the terminology of our natural science era, it combines the causal way of thinking which seeks to explain facts by reducing them to relationships expressed as natural laws, with the cultural way of thinking which tries to comprehend the meaning and structure of mental phenomena. Yet in this dual role psychoanalysis has limits that are manifested most clearly in the exaggerated systems of Adler and Jung, each of whom emphasizes one side of dualistic psychology at the expense of the other. The hypercausality of Jung's phylogenetic theory led him to reduce the principle of psychological causation to an absurdity, while the hyperfinality in Adler's individual psychology kept him from seeing anything but structural tendencies. Paradoxically, Jung was opposed to the natural scientific elements of his system which he overextended in his phylogenetic causality; and Adler disregarded the actual cultural scientific foundation of his own individual psychological view. Psychoanalysis itself, which would like to do justice to both problems, neglects reality and values the psychic, which it then tries to explain on the basis of reality. Yet only psychoanalysis so clearly betrays the inherent unity of these two sides of psychology. Originally its ideas were purely therapeutic, and they tended to release the psychological type of person from his compulsion to understand others in order to learn about himself. This growth in understanding through others helped the knower therapeutically, because it signified love and justified his own personality. But it was just this unpsychological aspect of affectionate understanding that brought the good therapeutic view of psychoanalysis to grief, for it was finally the understanding psychoanalyst who sent the self-conscious neurotic back to the very self-knowledge from which he wanted to escape. On the whole, psychoanalysis failed therapeutically because it aggravated man's psychologizing rather than healed him of his introspection. The theory which had evolved from a therapeutically oriented understanding of man into a scientifically motivated knowledge of self yielded only a psychology of the psychological type of man who still yearned to become unpsychological and more like the "normal man" whose psychology science always wanted to find but could not, because he had none.

Thusjpsychology, as a science and as a scientific technique for influencing others, is basically an interpretation of another's mental life in terms of one's own attitudes of feeling and willing. When we cannot change or get rid of another person, we can at least interpret him in terms of ourselves. And yet our individual psychology also reflects others and their reaction to our projection of our psychology upon them. In short, we not only express hostility toward others and try to control them by interpreting them as we will, but we reinterpret ourselves in their image, and call the process love. In this sense psychology is a reciprocal reflex phenomenon, or a kind of Fata Morgana of our real selves, which we see only in the mental mirroring of ourselves in others, and of them in us.

This brings us back to the problem of the real object of psychology. At first this object was the supernatural and non-human soul, but with the gradual disappearance of ancient spiritual belief from his consciousness, man himself became the object of psychological interest and research. In this sense religion is just as good a psychology as our scientific psychology is a doctrine of the soul which it denies. The current interest in psychology is essentially a pursuit of religion and of a belief in the soul. The difference between religion and psychology lies in the fact that religion is a belief in the soul, while scientific psychology denies the soul as it pursues the spiritual belief inherent in its own interest in the individual ego.

In other words, from religion to modern psychology, human evolution is nothing but a progressive individualization of spiritual belief which gradually turned from the universal soul to the individual soul or ego. Nonscientific psychology does not understand the soul but wants to postulate it, and modern psychology, which wants to pass judgment on it, concedes the possibility of its existence and postulates it as an object of research without really admitting that it exists. ^There is a third and pre-final stage in the evolution of psychology, in which psychology and not man or his soul, becomes the object of psychological study. This is quite proper, for psychology itself has gradually abandoned its original denial and negation of the soul, and has offered substitute objects not only for man's lost belief in the soul but for man who lost that belief. Just as religion represents a psychological commentary on the social evolution of man, various psychologies represent our current attitudes toward spiritual belief. In the animistic era, psychologizing was a creating of the soul; in the religious era, it was a representing of the soul to one's self; in our era of natural science it is a knowing of the individual soul. w Yet we still cling to the original spiritual belief, which was a naive belief in immortality. Only unlike animistic man we do not do this consciously; we are ashamed of it and we deny it. What persists as unconscious spirituality in us all isnot the biological animal of psychoanalytic theory, but the mental spirit which can never be contained by a materialistic terminology. Our psychological heritage from the race is the soul, the spiritual belief, the ancient psychology in which we all unconsciously believe, but which our modern psychology helps us consciously to deny. This view conforms to the increasingly recognized fact that primitive man was less realistically oriented than is modern man. He was unrealistic, spiritual, and more concerned with the supernatural powers he projected into nature than with the causes that might explain it. To the extent that we have become more realistic, we have to preserve within ourselves the spiritual forces that no longer find any place in our outer world. Primitive man recognized the soul consciously, believed in it, and filled his world with this spiritual belief so that it became as unreal as himself.

We are psychologists, so oriented psychologically by our denial of spirituality that we "motivate causally" what is really motivated spiritually, and try to substitute for belief a knowledge which ultimately rests on belief in the soul. This brings all the contradictions and irrational elements into our mental lives and psychological systems. Primitive man projected the soul into his total reality and universe, and arrived at a supernatural, primitively magical, and ultimately religious point of view. In accepting both reality and ourselves as being realistic, we no longer project so much onto the other world as onto other men. Our projection onto the other person, and its reaction upon ourselves, comprise objective psychology.